While Javascript earned the top spot in GitHub’s yearly review of the most popular languages, Python came in a close second.

With its low learning curve and fast deployment times, Python is a favourite language for a vast array of applications; web-development, machine-learning, or simple automation scripts, Python does it all.

For each use case you can be almost certain there exists a library to match, and with thousands of new libraries developed and published each year it can be a daunting task to keep track.

Here are some of our favourite picks released throughout 2017.

Python Fire

Creating command-line interfaces for your python scripts is a simple task, but it can also be time consuming and hard to maintain.

Python Fire by Google strips aways the need to write any interface code by automatically allowing you to interact with any class function straight from the command line.

License: Apache License 2.0

Link: GitHub

Creator: Google

Face Recognition

Whether you’re trying to sort your vacation photos or developing the next state of the art tracking software, facial recognition algorithms have many uses.

This simple and lightweight library makes adding facial recognition technology to your next project a breeze. Pass it an image and it will output the various faces detected or it can even detect unique facial features (eyes, nose, mouth, etc) which can then be used to identify similar faces or make automated edits.

License: MIT License

Link: GitHub

Creator: Adam Geitgey

PyeCharts

Python has no shortage of charting libraries, however many of them are hard to learn, harder still to visually customise, and rarely offer interactivity.

PyeCharts is a python implementation of the javascript charting library ECharts.

It has a small learning curve (only 7 lines of code to generate the above graph) and can easily produce visually stunning, interactive, and informative graphs.

License: MIT License

Link: GitHub

Creator: PyeCharts Dev Team

PipEnv

PipEnv doesn’t introduce anything radical or new, instead what it does it combine two essential python tools for python development (pip and virtualenv) into a single streamlined implementation.

Launched by the official Python Packaging Authority at the start of 2017, PipEnv has grown to become a top rated, essential addition to any python development environment.

License: MIT License

Link: GitHub

Creator: Python Packaging Authority

Better Exceptions

We’ve all been there; finishing a long day of coding, run it, and up comes an unanticipated exception––cue running through the code throwing print statements everywhere hoping to nail down the fault.

Better Exceptions eases that task by showing additional context to any errors or exceptions raised; more time coding, less time debugging.

License: MIT License

Link: GitHub

Creator: Josh Junon